I recently finished a six week course on regenerative agriculture at a local university. You know, one of those “keep the old farts learning” courses. It was super interesting and gave me lots to think about and information to share with Kyla. The course was taught by a Spanish fellow who quit academia to start his own small scale, regenerative farm. In his introduction he said creating policy papers that fell on deaf ears was just too frustrating and unsatisfying, so he decide to go full grass roots farmer.
As the weeks wore on that last statement really started to resonate with me. The bit about policy advice falling on deaf ears. One of the big take aways is that the current agricultural model is unsustainable. This is particularly true of consuming animal products. This was all backed up with numbers and statistics and examples galore. He pointed out that it takes 10 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of meat. He suggested that by changing agriculture we could return 30% of the current agricultural land to it’s natural state and still produce enough food for everyone on the planet.
I was the youngest person in the class (just pointing that out) and the only plant eater. A couple of the other students were receptive to what they were being told. Some though, and one older woman in particular, were stubbornly, aggressively, vehemently opposed to picking up what professor Esteban was laying down. The first time the animal agriculture is not sustainable point came up the naysayers started babbling about vitamin deficiencies. When I mentioned that omnivores tend to have more but different vitamin deficiencies than vegetarians and vegans it fell on deaf ears. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26502280/
In another class the teacher talked about “better” ways to graze cattle (if you had to graze cattle) than just letting the cows go full all-you-can-eat-buffet in a field. I emphasize the word “better” here because there is a difference between “good” and “better”. Traditional grazing practices compress the soil and strip it of the vegetation that it needs to support life and regenerate. The point being that “better than that” is really no good at all. Anyway it was amazing how a few people latched on to the grass fed beef thing and ran with it. Despite the message being that eating less meat is a crucial step in sustainable farming, these people only heard that strategic grazing was better than traditional grazing which somehow equaled “factory farming bad. Grass fed beef OK”.
Then there was the I suppose it’s possible, but we grew up eating meat so how can you expect us to just not eat meat? This is another pretty typical question I’ve heard. Being told to embrace something that you have no intention of doing, especially amongst older people seems to be a non starter. Even when the professor suggested trying the one day a week to start idea they seemed skeptical. By this time I had stopped engaging in the conversations because it was becoming increasingly obvious that nothing was going to change this person’s mind.
In the last class when the teacher was going over all the germane points he hoped we would take away, the eat less meat thing came up for the last time. Our protagonist’s final kick at the can was to go on a diatribe about how meat replacements are worse than real meat, followed by have you seen how many ingredient are in those things? This is a pretty popular argument these days with the meat industry fighting back against the growing popularity of plant based eating.
From what I’ve read, while meat replacements often have a lot of ingredients, including way too much salt, they are still better for you and the environment than actual red meat. Hell, nothing in fake meat is classified as a class two carcinogen. Not to mention that you shouldn’t be basing your diet on meat replacements anyway. I kind of feel like the rise in these products is doing a disservice to the plant based movement, but that’s for another rant. https://vegfaqs.com/beyond-meat-vs-beef/
I get that confirmation bias is alive and well and that we all fall victim to it’s pull from time to time. What I really learned is that sometimes it’s best just to shut up because nothing the prof. or I said was going to make any difference. Just like the MAGA people memes. It really highlighted what I suspected all along and that is that we as a species are screwed because some people and maybe the majority of people are not willing to change for the sake of themselves, the animals or future generations. The one bright spot was that at the very end a few of my classmates did ask about decent plant based recipe websites.